Sen. Lindsey Graham, a 2016 candidate for president, recently called
for sending 10,000 troops to Iraq. Fellow GOP presidential hopefuls Rick
Perry, Scott Walker and George Pataki say they’re open to the idea.
Last week, two key architects of George W. Bush’s 2007 troop surge told
the Senate that up to 20,000 additional U.S. troops are needed to defeat
the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. They’ve found an ally in Sen.
John McCain, a longtime Republican hawk.

And even though
President Barack Obama has ruled out the idea of a ground combat force —
which is also a nonstarter for congressional Democrats — polls show
growing public support for the idea.

Aside from the fact that the usual suspects are calling for war, war, war as the only way to deal with the ISIS threat, the real question, other than WTF?, is what in hell do you expect to accomplish by sending 10,000 or even 20,000 troops to fight ISIS on the ground?

I suggest one possible accomplishment: the biggest ISIS recruitment video in the history of ISIS recruitment videos. Sending 10,000 Americans to Iraq is one way of getting 50,000 new volunteers for ISIS.

Mind you, we'd blew people and stuff up really well for a while. And maybe, as we did in the last surge, we'd pay off some Sunnis to act all un-ISIS-like. Then we'd leave and the Middle East would go back to being the Middle East, with the Sunnis and Shia hating each other and both of them hating the Jews while chanting Death to America.

Or -- and that's a big OR -- we could let them sort it out and tell them that, when the smoke clears, we're going to be buying even less oil from them because we've decided the best way to win this war was through diplomacy, when feasible, and innovation in new energy sources and methods, where possible.

I've driven across Germany in the past year or so, and this is what it looks like.

About the American Human

The American Human is written by Calvin Ross, a retired teacher who at various points in life has been a musician, woodworker, restaurateur, narrator, English teacher in Japan, novelist, technology journalist, and private tutor to Japanese children here in the U.S.

Happily residing in the wine country of Sonoma County north of San Francisco, Calvin has lived in the Philippines, the Netherlands, and the aforementioned Japan, as well as in Chicago, Colorado, Georgia, and many different towns in California, including, of all places, the Mojave Desert.

Calvin, you may note quickly, is a liberal progressive who doesn't think being called a socialist is all that bad, especially since he sort of would like living in Denmark if it weren't so cold. He blogs because he can.